


I'll Sing You Two-Oh!

by aprilwitching



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: BLLB Spoilers, Gen, in which i really just wanted an excuse for 2 of my slightly neglected fav characters to interact, written before the release of trk
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-29
Updated: 2015-07-29
Packaged: 2018-04-11 21:28:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,920
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4453019
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aprilwitching/pseuds/aprilwitching
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Noah deals with an unusual sort of home invader.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I'll Sing You Two-Oh!

He’s more a feeling of being there than an actual person, at first. Like, this buzzy sensation outlining fingers, toes, feet, organs, and oh, yeah, right, he has all those, and he’s a body, and he’s a _he_ , and he’s  _him_ , he’s Noah. 

Dead Noah Czerny, standing cold and itchy and fairly solid in the middle of Monmouth Manufacturing. 

If anybody ever asked him to describe what it’s  _like_ , fading back into existence this way, not that they ever  _do_ , or ever  _will_ , or that he especially  _wants_  them to, but okay, if they  _did_  ask, he might compare it to the feeling you get when the circulation to one of your legs is cut off, and then you have to get up and walk, suddenly, and the feeling in the leg comes back as pins and needles, slowly, so it’s a while before it feels totally like a real, normal leg and not a phantom limb made of those Alka-Seltzer fizzes left after the tablet dissolves. 

(He can remember that feeling from when he was alive. He can remember it well. Noah always sat…sits?…on top of his legs too much.)

Anyway, he always thinks it’s a little bit like that, but with a whole self, everything that he even  _is_ , instead of just with one leg. Pins and needles. It doesn’t hurt, and it’s not scary, but it isn’t really comfortable, either. He tries to sort of shake it off by moving his hands around in wobbly circles, wriggling his shoulders up and down. He squints at the sunlight pooling into the big room– it must be late morning– and he breathes out really hard, gasping or sighing, because he can (or to see  _whether_  he can, this time).

 Then he tries to find Blue. 

He can still sense the energy that let him manifest, sort of humming all around him, getting all circulated through his various pieces and parts like blood. (Ew.) It’s not the ley line, mostly; there’s some extra thing nearby, letting him tap into it, doing most of the work here. It’s cracklier and more…personal seeming…than the ley line. Brighter. And, like Blue’s energy always has, it even  _feels_  blue, somehow, blue like the color, like a deep sky color, even though it isn’t like he exactly sees it with his eyes or anything. Nobody else has energy at all like that, not that  _he’s_  ever met, at least. 

So. 

Blue! 

Good.

 He hasn’t spent as much time with her lately as he used to, and he likes her so much. It’s a little weird that she’s in Monmouth at, like, 10 AM, on what he’s pretty sure is a school day, by herself (by herself? Yeah– if Gansey or Ronan or anybody else was around, he’d hear them. Feel them. He’d know they were there). But come  _on_ , who else could it

…Noah, as much as he’d like to give in to wishful thinking, is way too aware of certain things to be very successful at doing so. It’s  _not_  Blue. It’s someone a lot  _like_  Blue, but people’s souls and minds are more distinctive than their voices or teeth or fingerprints. The color’s just a little bit different, a little bit off. The thoughts he feels nudging at him through/behind the current are all jagged and sharp and disorderly. Hard to understand. Not very Blue-ish at all. But:  _Hi, Blue. Blue, Blue. Hey. Blue?_ , he thinks back towards them as he turns to one side, opening his mouth in case he wants to say something, already knowing it isn’t her. He’s a little bit scared. He blinks. He sees who’s there. Also hears her, her voice making words.

“I’ll sing you one-oh,” sings the woman who stands bent at the waist over Gansey’s elaborate cardboard Henrietta model, a giant tapping the building tops with her long, spidery fingers. She taps in time with her singing. “Green grow the rushes, oh! What is your one-oh?” 

 No, she  _definitely_  isn’t Blue Sargent. But there’s maybe kind of a visual resemblance, in spite of the fact that the woman is taller than some professional basketball players and Blue is shorter than a lot of sixth-grade kids– she’s got a huge tangle of messy, dark hair hiding her face, and her clothes are colorfully mismatched. She’s wearing a skimpy, ragged dress. It probably wasn’t supposed to be  _that_  short of a dress, but it’s really, really short on her. Tight, too. It looks like she might’ve cut the sleeves off, to get her arms through. Under it, to cover the rest of the space between her shoulders and the floor, she’s wearing a long, neon orange skirt made of some shiny, plasticky material Noah thinks he’d like to touch. It makes her look sort of like an enormous traffic cone.

“One is one,” sings the woman. Her voice is scratchy and airy at the same time. It sounds familiar. “And all alone,” she continues, caressing a pretend Henrietta building in a way that makes Noah uncomfortable, because hey, that’s _Gansey’s_ –

“And ev-er-more shall be it so-ooo!” she concludes, grinning, as she stands upright and moves to face him, building still in hand. 

Oh no. Oh no. Oh no, no, no. No no no. Shit. He recognizes her now. No. Nope. He takes a step backwards. He takes another step backwards. Tries to let go and disappear, but can’t. She’s not just letting him use her energy, she’s holding him with it, keeping him solid, keeping him here. Noah hears himself making a whimpering, whining noise, involuntary and dripping with fear. The woman obviously hears it too; her grin turns into a smirk.

“Don’t fret, puppy,” she says. “I mean no harm to you. Besides, you are dead; what more do you have to be frightened of, on this earth? You should be braver, I’d think. Silly dog. Silly boy-o, oh…” 

Noah gets the distinct impression she’s about to start singing again, which would be more creepy than he thinks he can stand at this point. (Also, sometimes it’s kind of annoying how often people compare him to small, cute animals.  _Really_. It’s like nobody takes him seriously at all.) He interrupts her.

“You,” he points to the woman, shuddering.  _Collect yourself. Okay, man. Just say it._  “You,” his arm draws back and hovers near the side of his face, “you, you went _inside_  my…you made me  _say_  things! You pushed me out, I…” He knows he’s babbling, but her presence is making him remember stuff he doesn’t want to remember. Upsetting stuff. It’s hard to talk. He presses his hands up to his ears, covering his ears hard, like spiritual possession works by going down the, the noise canals, or whatever. With the sound waves. It’s a stupid thing to do. He does it anyway. “Just leave,” he says to the woman. “This place isn’t yours.”

The woman cocks her head. “That didn’t stop  _you_  from coming here, did it? Oh, little corpse.” She laughs. He’s not sure if she’s laughing at him, or at some joke he’s missed, or just in general. “I won’t ask your forgiveness for that, nor can I say I regret it. For look! Am I not now free, and woken, and upright beneath the open sky?” Cardboard tower still in hand, she flings her arms wide and does a messy, graceful twirl across the floor, bringing her much, much closer to Noah, who, for reasons he isn’t quite sure of, doesn’t draw back and away. He’s still upset. He thinks he’s probably mad at this woman. But he knows, of course he does, he can’t help knowing, some of what happened to her. How she felt, down in the ground for such a long time. Down in the dark. It sucks, being sacrificed. (That doesn’t mean he has to like her.)

“You’re not under the sky,” he mutters, in spite of himself. “You’re under a ceiling.”

“So indeed I am, I am,” she agrees. Another laugh. It’s like a very regal rusty door hinge screeching. “But nevertheless, and nonetheless and all the same to dead men–”

_Please don’t start singing again_ , Noah thinks.

She immediately stops. “Oh, just as well. I wish I had not had to frighten you, nor the little blue lily. As much as that may be worth, puppy-corpse.”

“Hey–”

“Although,” the woman interrupts, continuing reflectively with a long fingertip pressed to her sharp chin, “I’d not have minded frightening that shaven-headed one. That snake with feathers. He has _such_  uncharitable thoughts about me, you know. Cruel, wicked thoughts regarding my predicament, and its deservedness. I! A poor, bound lady, left to rot under stone and dirt!” More spine-chilling laughter. She seems to do it the way other people shrug or roll their eyes or crack their knuckles.

“What? Oh. You mean Ronan. Oh. But he has uncharitable thoughts about almost everybody. It’s nothing, like, personal.” Noah tries to imagine Ronan interacting with this person. He hadn’t known they’d met, he’s pretty sure. And he’s not getting any clear pictures of the encounter from the fractured stream of the woman’s thoughts, though he can tell she’s not lying. Maybe that’s for the best. He’s not sure if he wants to know exactly what happened. He wonders if anything got blown up.

“As though that matters, when it comes to harm done.” She sounds bitter, and leaves off the laugh at the end. Her face looks serious for a moment, sad and much younger. As young as Noah, or Ronan, or Blue, or any of the rest of them.

_I don’t have to like her_ , Noah reminds himself. But he understands what she means, and she’s right. 

Still. That’s not the point right now.

“Okay, okay, but why are you  _here_? Right  _now_? Did somebody let you in? Gansey? Oh. Oh, oh. No. Geez. You picked the lock?” His hands, having left his ears, start sort of fluttering around by themselves. This could be bad. This could be bad?

“I have many talents, and many mystic arts,” the woman informs him, grin back in place. She seems to have more teeth than most people.

“That’s breaking and entering.”

“I will not deny it! Don’t fret. Your little king won’t mind. I intend to help him search for my father’s grave, you see? I thought I ought, perhaps, to see what plans he has laid out already. His maps. His grimoires. His store of knowledge. All the treasure at his disposal. Most of all, here,” she taps the side of her temple, through a tangle of hair, “in his noble, foolish skull.”

Sometimes Noah is glad about the way he can see inside people. The mind-reading, or whatever you want to call it. He doubts he would have any idea what the woman is talking about now if he had to rely on just what she actually said. Noah has never been that quick to follow fancy, or clever, or poetic speech, not like most of his friends. The woman’s slight, unplaceable accent and the way she keeps slipping into sing-song chanting while she talks don’t help. 

But he  _can_  see inside her, or the, like,  _essence_  of her, going through and all around her, the way her thoughts spill out with her crackling blue energy. (It’s not “seeing”. But “seeing” is close enough.) The thoughts are little glass fish swimming all around the two of them, and they’re growing more clear to Noah by the second, and so he totally gets what he’s being told almost right away.

“Glendower’s your  _dad_?! No way. You’re–”

“The king’s mad daughter, fair daughter, witch daughter,” she laughs, and places the cardboard tower on the floor between them with surprising gentleness. Both hands free, she lifts the shiny plastic edges of her skirt and curtseys. It manages to look like a sincerely polite gesture and a deeply self-mocking one at the same time. “Gwenllian. No princess, of course, not I. Had I been born with stones and a spout, they’d have had to call me bastard.” 

Noah thinks. Catches little glass fish between words.

“Oh, wow. Bummer. So Glendower had, like, affairs? Gansey must have been really disappointed when he found out. Uh, you want to help with…” he tries to indicate everything he’s trying to find a nice, small, convenient word for by waving his arms around vaguely and making faces. “Stuff,” he finishes, lamely. “All the stuff. You think you can find, like, clues he missed if you look through his things when he isn’t around, because you’re. Part of it. From then. Plus, you think you’re a lot smarter than he is.”

“No,” says Gwenllian, her serious face making a short reappearance. “Not smarter. Only wiser.” 

“You could have just asked. He would have let you in, I think. I bet he would’ve.”

Gwenllian sticks her tongue out at him. 

He does the same thing back. “Maybe you wanted to look through his underwear drawer. Maybe I’ll tell him that’s what you did.” 

Her loudest laugh yet. A real cackle. “Maybe I shall yet do that very thing, and render your words honest!”

“No, don’t. Seriously.” 

“Pfft. I shan’t, puppy. Do you keep food in this place, by chance? I grow hungry.”

“I dunno.” Noah thinks about whether it’s a good idea to let Gwenllian raid the Monmouth fridge. Probably not. Someone’s likely to get pissed. But also, he doesn’t think there’s any way he can stop her. He sighs.“We have this bathroom upstairs that’s also the laundry room, and that’s where the fridge is. I think a lot of the stuff in it’s expired.” 

“I care not for the constraints of time and decay!” Gwenllian waves a regal, dismissive hand. “Upstairs, you say? That way forward?” She points in the correct direction.

“Uh-huh. But, like, also, it’s seriously right next to the toilet. The fridge.” Noah pauses. “Ronan lives here. You know. The uncharitable guy. He’s gross sometimes. It might not be too, um, sanitary to eat the fridge stuff.” 

Gwenllian, somehow, is already almost to the stairs. She makes a dismissive noise without stopping or turning around. “I shall return, no never fear! I shall return!” she sings/shouts. 

Oh, well. Okay, then.

This is shaping up to be one of the weirder, more eventful mornings of Noah Czerny’s afterlife so far. He’s already feeling tired. Not tired like he’s low on energy, or close to breaking up, becoming more ghostly, drifting away. Just regular dealing-with-stuff-is-hard, what-am-I-going-to-tell-Gansey-and-Ronan, how-come-everything-has-to-happen-so-much tired. It’s a little like feeling alive, that kind of tired. In a way. He decides maybe he doesn’t mind it too much.

Noah looks at the sunshine. It looks warm. It looks soft. There are sparkly pieces of dust floating through the shafts of light. It’s nice. He starts humming the murder squash song under his breath. There are rummagey, clinking sounds coming from above. A suspiciously heavy thump. The toilet flushes. Gwenllian laughs and laughs.

Whatever she’s doing, he guesses it’s fun for her. Whatever mess she just made. He could know, if he wanted. Or he could go up there and find her. Or he could find out if she’s distracted enough to let him leave, now, if he’d stay  _Noah_ -ish enough without a body to go find one of the others, put himself back together for them, tattle. He could try to do that.

He doesn’t. He looks at the sun some more, and his hands in it, too-pale and cold as always but not uncertain or unreal. Not see-through, not distorted. He had needed to cut his nails when he died, and now they’re slightly too long forever. The white parts stick out over his fingertips. He wriggles them at himself.  _Hi, Noah. Welcome back._

He notices the cardboard tower is still sitting on the floor in front of him. It’s started to slide over to one side a little, like it’s tired, too, or like it wants his attention. Poor tower. It must want to go home to its friends. He crouches down (the light changes as he gets closer to the floor; the tower gets bigger) and makes his hands go around it at the base. It barely weighs anything. He picks it up carefully, maybe more carefully than he has to. 

Noah stands up and carries the tower slowly back to Gansey’s model Henrietta. He moves like he’s on a tightrope, he knows, or trying to make a cop think he’s sober enough to drive when he isn’t. It doesn’t matter, though. No one sees. No one cares. No one’s gonna give him a hard time about it. When he reaches the empty space where the tower is supposed to stand, he spends as much time as he needs to make sure it’s exactly back the way it was before Gwenllian picked it up, that Gansey will never, ever be able to tell it was touched or moved.

Gwenllian is still making noises upstairs.

Noah finds a clean, Noah-sized spot on the floor, right in the light and the pretty, drifting dust. He sits down on it, legs tucked under the rest of him. One okay thing about being the way he is: they won’t go numb or prickly like that, no matter how long he stays in the same position. He folds up comfortably. Hums a little louder. Closes his eyes. Waits for the next thing that’s going to happen to him today.


End file.
